Will Apple’s iOS 5 bear fruit with developers?

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Amid all the suspicions of what is going to be available to developers in iOS 5, there are a few confirmed additions that have developers buzzing. Among these are a new notification center, an over-the-air sync feature, and the ability to continue to create hybrid mobile/Web applications.

Other additions, according to the company, include Newsstand, iMessage, and new features in Safari, such as the Safari Reader.

“The new notification center is the most significant because it lets developers communicate with their users when the application isn’t open,” said Ryan Engle, senior iOS developer at Mutual Mobile.

Henry Balanon, cofounder and director of mobile at Detroit Labs, viewed the inclusion of automatic reference counting as the most significant new feature. “It is basically the convenience of garbage collection with the speed of using retain/release. Developers are used to explicitly doing retain/releases, and now we don’t have to do that,” he said.

Joe Pezzillo, cofounder of Push IO (a cloud service provider for mobile devices), said that he is impressed with the changes. He believed this shows that Apple is beginning to understand the pain points felt by developers, and it is interested in making significant changes to ease them.

“Apple is using their position to improve its platform for developers too, which most competitors don’t do,” he said. “Apple is providing better tools for the planning and development stage of the process.”

One such example is Joseph Lewis’ most awaited feature: location simulation. Lewis, chief Web architect at Sandia National Laboratories, explained that although location simulation is a simple addition, it’s a necessary one.

“We have a lot of location-aware app development going on, and it is going to be useful to have that instead of hard-coding location in,” he said.